Jailing kids is a proud American tradition

Thomas Frank gets his Jonathan Swift on regarding the juvenile detention kickback scandal in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania.

Privatizing bits of the prison industry was a step in the right direction, but what we didn’t have — until recently — were proper instruments for incentivizing the judiciary. That’s what the “kids for cash” judges were apparently experimenting with.

Today the do-gooders revile those efforts as “kickbacks,” but before long we will see them as legitimate tools of justice. Our laws governing lobbying and campaign contributions have struck the right balance between the wishes of the people and those of private industry, so why are we so quick to doubt that the same great results can be achieved by putting the government’s justice-dealing branch on the same market-based course?

I am rarely as outraged as I was upon hearing about the scandal in Luzerne County; I admire Frank’s ability to channel his outrage into something this brilliant and cutting.

Cities and counties rely on U.S. immigrant detention fees

Municipalities in California and elsewhere—but mostly California—are increasingly tapping a new Federal revenue source.

Roughly two-thirds of the nation’s immigrant detainees are held in local jails, and the payments to cities and counties for housing them have increased as the federal government has cracked down on illegal immigrants with criminal records and outstanding deportation orders.

Washington paid nearly $55.2 million to house [immigrant] detainees at 13 local jails in California in fiscal year 2008, up from $52.6 million the previous year. The U.S. is on track to spend $57 million this year.

As usual, the details of profit-seeking behavior are even more outrageous than the supply-side nonsense:

Santa Ana’s Police Department, for example, expects as much as a 15% budget cut and has had a hiring freeze since October that has resulted in more than 60 sworn and civilian positions remaining vacant, Police Chief Paul Walters said. To offset reductions, Walters plans to convert two multipurpose rooms at the 480-bed jail into dormitory rooms this spring. That will accommodate an additional 32 immigrant detainees, which he expects will bring in $1 million more in revenue each year. He also hopes to get approval to raise the nightly price per detainee from $82 to $87.

“We treat [the jail] as a business,” Walters said. “The cuts could have been much deeper if it weren’t for the ability to raise money there.”

bfunk's bookmarks tagged carceral urbanism

The readings for one of my seminars have recently focused on urban issues surrounding racism and law enforcement. I was happy to find a long list of supplemental material under bfunk’s carceral urbanism tag.

The best two sentences I’ve read for class today highlight the difficulty of finding employment if you’re an ex-offender in the United States:

In another striking example of the creative remaking of worker identities within this racially structured contingent economy, it was reported that some Latino ex-offenders would on occasion pass themselves off as undocumented workers, in order to gain access to the word-of-mouth recruitment channels and labor corners that have been organized around the undocumented population. The kind of work that can be accessed through these means tends to be extremely exploitative and often dangerous, but by the standards of the ex-offender labor market it is comparatively plentiful.

From Peck, J., & Theodore, N. (2008). Carceral Chicago: Making the Ex-offender Employability Crisis. International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, 32(2), 251-281. [available here behind a paywall]

Guantánamo for kids

Anna Perera’s book Guantánamo Boy is the fictional account of a teenager from the UK who is abducted from his relatives’ house in Karachi and sent to the detention camp.

It sounds unlikely but, according to Perera, it is well-established that juveniles have been held at Guantánamo, although the numbers are disputed. Reprieve, the charity for prisoners from death row to Guantánamo, has recorded that 22 under-16s have been held at the camp. The youngest juvenile still in custody is Mohammed el Gharani, who was 14 when picked up in a random raid on a mosque by Pakistani bounty-hunters and “sold” to the American authorities for $5,000.

It was stories like these that Guantánamo Boy is based on, although the book itself emerged out of just one line delivered by the human rights lawyer Clive Stafford Smith at a benefit event for Reprieve in 2006.

“At that gig Clive Stafford Smith simply said ‘children are also held in Guantánamo Bay’ and that one statement inspired this novel,” says Perera.

The book is available at Amazon UK.

1 in 31 U.S. Adults are Behind Bars, on Parole or Probation

The Pew Report linked here good source for the sobering data on incarceration rates in the United States.

In the past two decades, state general fund spending on corrections increased by more than 300 percent, outpacing other essential government services from education, to transportation and public assistance. Only Medicaid spending has grown faster.  Today, corrections imposes a national taxpayer burden of $68 billion a year.  Despite this increased spending, recidivism rates have remained largely unchanged.

The full report and individual reports for each state are available as PDF downloads at the bottom of the page.